Artist: Tom Hunter
Commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery.
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"This is a magical film. It weaves the memories of people who grew up in East London and have lived on the estate since it opened into a silvery thread of meaning illuminated by dramatisations of their experiences filmed in the aged, but dignified Woodberry Down buildings and public spaces."
Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
Article | review by Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
MEMORY SEQUENCES FILMED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
A FILM BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Commissioned by Turner Contemporary, Margate.
Two channel synchronised installation
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Unlike his contemporary Richard Long, Hamish Fulton leaves no formal mark or intervention on the land through which he travels.
"As far as I know, Fulton has never made a film before (too full, too revealing). But now he is showing the people of Margate walking round one of the famous boating pools on the beach. Slow, silent and equidistant, each figure files round the edge: a line, a stitch, a tooth in a comb. The effect is extraordinarily potent."
Article | review by Laura Cumming, The Guardian
Margate Walking formed part of Walking In Relation To Everything at Galerie Tschudi, Switzerland 2020.
Artist: Melanie Manchot
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Commissioned by SRG SSR / Swiss Broadcasting Corporation.
Six two minute programmes were commissioned to accompany the daily coverage of the World Cup Ski Jumping Championships in Engelberg, Switzerland as an 'intervention' to the daily national TV coverage of the event.
The films were shot and edited in a single day and then aired on consecutive days of the championships.
This selection of programmes gives an insight into the preparations of the inrun and the cutting of the ski tracks, the team who look after the ski jump hill, the pre-jump preparations of the ski jumpers and Abbot Christian draws parallels between the act of jumping and higher interventions.
FILMED AND EDITED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Other films made with Melanie Manchot: Stephen (in part) | Flotilla | Cornered Star | Out of Bounds | The Gift | Twelve | Tracer | Dance (All Night) Paris | Walk (Square)
Artist: Melanie Manchot
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The post-industrial city of Marl in Germany carries the scars of the economic depression that followed the fall of the mining industry. City squares are filled with public sculptures and bear witness of the past growth of the town. In Cornered Star, a horse stands alone on the main city square.
Early morning lights progressively illuminate the brutalist concrete architecture. The horse is almost static but in spite of his relative fixity, it remains the only source of life present in this deserted urban environment. The work looks at the archetypal forms of equestrian public sculptures and more broadly questions the use, codes and authority of public space artwork.
Cornered Star formed part of Open Ended Now at MAC VAL, Paris.
FILMED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Other films made with Melanie Manchot: Stephen (in part) | Flotilla | Out of Bounds | The Gift | Twelve | Tracer | Dance (All Night) Paris | Walk (Square) | LEAP
Artist: Ruth Maclennan
Commissioned and produced by Film and Video Umbrella, London.
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Filmed among the desert expanses of Kazakhstan the film introduces three iconic characters: a historian, a prospector and an archaeologist; each of them methodically journeying across this apparently empty but symbolically charged terrain.
FILMED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Artist: Shona Illingworth
Lesions in the Landscape was shortlisted for the 2016 Jarman Award.
Commissioned by the Wellcome Trust.
Three channel synchronised installation
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Lesions in the Landscape was shortlisted for the 2016 Jarman Award.
Lesions in the Landscape is a powerful multi-screen installation, exploring the impact of amnesia and the erasure of individual and cultural memory. The film reveals the devastating effects of amnesia on one woman and the striking parallels with the sudden evacuation of the inhabitants of St. Kilda in the North Atlantic in 1930. It examines the profound effect and wider implications of memory loss on identity, space and the capacity to imagine the future.
Lesions in the Landscape was filmed on Hirta, the main island of the St. Kilda archipelago, and in the seas around the island of Boreray and Stac Lee - the highest sea stack in Britain.
Lesions in the Landscape was first screened at FACT, Liverpool and CGP Gallery, London. It has since toured to Sydney, Australia and Toronto, Canada.
FILMED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Other films made with Shona Illingworth: 216 Westbound | Balnakiel
Artist: Melanie Manchot
Commissioned by Great North Run Culture.
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Tracer features ten North East parkour runners, or traceurs, making their way along the course of the Bupa Great North Run.
"Of all the artists in this show, Baudelaire would surely have preferred the German-born photographer and film-maker Melanie Manchot. Manchot goes straight for the transient and contingent with a three-screen installation that moves through the modern city like a high-speed flaneur. Set in different parts of Newcastle, this epic film follows a group of free runners practising parkour, running through streets, along ledges, across bridges and roofs – tracing the lineaments of the city with their feet.
Manchot has been shortlisted for this year’s Derek Jarman award for art films and it’s no surprise. This study of mankind’s movement through the modern city – as the crow flies, and with absolute freedom – mesmerises."
Laura Cummings, The Guardian
Article | review by Laura Cumming, The Guardian
Go behind the scenes on Melanie Manchot's film Tracer in this short making of film.
FILMED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Other films made with Melanie Manchot: Stephen (in part) | Flotilla | Cornered Star | Out of Bounds | The Gift | Twelve | Dance (All Night) Paris | Walk (Square) | LEAP
Artist: Ori Gersht
Commissioned by The Round House and Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Three channel synchronised installation
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Offering confronts the glamorous and treacherous world of bullfighting, its dazzling spectacle and often-gruesome outcomes.
Originally screened at the Round House, London as part of Ron Arad’s Curtain Call. A circular screen became the viewers own corrida.
Article | Ron Arad’s Curtain Call, Moving Image Art
FILMED AND EDITED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Other films made with Ori Gersht: History Reflecting | Evaders | The Forest
Artist: Ori Gersht
Two channel synchronised installation
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Evaders explores the mountainous path of the Lister Route, used by the Jewish writer and philosopher, Walter Benjamin on his ill fated journey in 1940 to escape Nazi-occupied France.
Those who undertook to cross the Pyrenees into Spain were dubbed evaders. Tragically Walter Benjamin was refused entry into Spain on arriving in Portbou. This thwarted his plans to ultimately travel to the United States. Fearing repatriation to Nazi hands he took his own life.
The film’s protagonist is played by the actor Clive Russell.
Evaders was part of But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Article | Ori Gersht discusses journeys, borders and Evaders
FILMED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Other films made with Ori Gersht: History Reflecting | Offering | The Forest
Artist: Ergin Çavuşoğlu
To view the film click here
Six channel synchronised installation
Shuttling backwards and forwards between two contrasting points of origin, between fast-track, first world Europe and a place at its outermost edges, Point of Departure is a vivid portrait of modernity that, like the airport itself, is a platform for intercultural insight and exchange.
Point of Departure was shot at Stansted airport in the UK and at Trabzon airport on the Black Sea, Turkey.
FILMED AND EDITED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Other films made with Ergin Çavuşoğlu: Crystal & Flame
Artist: Melanie Manchot
Out of Bounds was shortlisted for the 2017 Jarman Award.
Two channel installation
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Out of Bounds was filmed in the high Alpine Valley of Engleberg and follows two different teams of mountain workers, people who day in and day out perform the same tasks to make the mountain safe and pleasurable – they are the hidden labour that allows the mountain industry to function. One is a team that goes up early in the mornings after a fresh snowfall to detonate controlled avalanches, and the second is a group of piste-bully drivers, flattening the mountain as if with a huge iron.
FILMED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Other films made with Melanie Manchot: Stephen (in part) | Flotilla | Cornered Star | The Gift | Twelve | Tracer | Dance (All Night) Paris | Walk (Square) | LEAP
A FILM BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Conceived by Nick Franglen.
HYMN TO LONDON BRIDGE
Commissioned by The Mayor's Thames Festival.
"I am going to be playing a theremin under London Bridge for 24 hours in a slowly developing collaboration with thousands of pedestrians who will unwittingly cut a hidden beam on the bridge that will momentarily mute the music I'm making".
Article | A man, a theremin and a horde of London Bridge commuters
HYMN TO THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE
Commissioned by the Make Music New York Festival.
Cyclists crossing the bridge became the unwitting producers of silence, momentarily muting the music being performed below.
“The photography is a hymn to the bridge in its own right. Highly recommended.”
New York Times
3RD STREET BLACKOUT, a feature directed by Negin Farsad and Jeremy Redleaf, used footage from Hymn to the Manhattan Bridge to create story telling interludes throughout their film.
Artist: Susan Stockwell
Commissioned by the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam.
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The film explores the sculpture Territory Dress and juxtaposes it with archival film of past seafaring imagery. It is as if the figure is remembering her history and making imaginary connections. Concerned with claiming female territory, mapping the body and exploring memories, traces and stories of colonial and social histories both the film and sculpture are about our colonial past and its contemporary significance.
Music by Rafael Anton Irisarri.
Article | Elephant: The British Artist Tackling the Long, Dark Shadow of Colonialism
Territory Dress is in the Tropenmuseum’s permanent exhibition Our Colonial Inheritance.
FILMED AND EDITED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Other films made with Susan Stockwell: Rumpelstiltskin
A FILM BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Artist: Simon Pope
The Halstow Wassail recently screened at Cecil Sharp House, London.
The Halstow Wassail takes place each year on a Devon cider farm that has been in the Gray family since the late 1600s.
Featuring singer- songwriter Jim Causley, Dartmoor folk singer Bill Murray, and the shanty crew Mariners Away, the film in a single uninterrupted camera shot documents this traditional event.
Unlike other wassails, The Halstow Wassail is a celebration of the microbial life of cider-making, with each verse acknowledging the importance of the yeasts and other fungi, bacteria and moulds, that live on the orchards and apples, in the barns, press and barrels, and in the cider itself.
The Halstow Wassail is one of several artistic experiments with local folkways associated with cider-making made by the artist Simon Pope in collaboration with singer-songwriter Jim Causley.
Further information about the project can be found on the Here’s to Thee website.
Article | BBC Radio 4 Front Row interview with Simon Pope and Jim Causley
Other films made with Simon Pope: Primary Agents Of A Social World | What Cannot Be Turned Aside | Memory Marathon
Written and Directed by Naz Sadoughi
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Heavily pregnant Natalie still parties hard. Homayra lives next door. She’s sick of Natalie and her friends. However one night, events change the course of the two women’s lives forever.
The Perfect Silence has screened at: London Short Film Festival, Encounters Short Film Festival, Big Sur International Film Series, S.O.U.L, Connect BFI.
FILMED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
